How to survive Black Friday shopping

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Black Friday shoppers wait in line to go inside the Brandy Melville store at Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose on Nov. 27, 2015. The store does not have sales, and Friday was the only day in the year they offered merchandise at 20 percent off.

Black Friday shopping seems to have gotten more complicated than ever. With stores launching their discounts on Thanksgiving and online retail deals posted for weeks, the shopping event has stretched longer than ever before.

But some Bay Area shoppers and consumer experts have become Black Friday shopping pros, and they have plenty of advice to get you through the day.

For the last 20 years, Dori Tamura, of Walnut Creek, has hit the stores. First rule, if you’re going with a group you better have a game plan. To keep everyone happy, find out where everyone wants to go, and make sure everyone is able to stop at their preferred destination.

For her and her friends, the trip has become a tradition of sorts. They used to get up early and wait in line on Black Friday for doors to open, but since stores started pushing hours earlier — some even opening Thanksgiving afternoon and evening, Tamura and her group has started shopping at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving night after eating and spending time with their families.

While the Thanksgiving openings have taken some of the fun out of the post-holiday anticipation,Tamura said, it’s often less crowded shopping through the night. She said she and her friends often shop for 10 or 12 hours.

For long hauls like that, Tamura said, it helps to have a spot to store their early bargain purchases so they can keep shopping. Because their car is usually filled after their first stop at Target, she uses a relative’s house in Dublin to drop off the goods before they head to the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara and Santana Row in San Jose.

Another piece of advice? Be price conscious. Not everything is a good deal, Tamura said. She said that she has seen toys much cheaper in October than on Black Friday, for example.

Retail experts provide similar advice: “Do your homework,” warns consumer advice website Consumer Reports. Watching out for deals early in the month, both online and in store, can help shoppers make comparisons to know what is a good bargain and what isn’t.

Local shopper Chris Schiavello said online retail offers the easiest way to compare prices and do the needed research. After years of waking up early, fighting crowds and searching for parking on Black Fridays, she said she’s a “converted online shopper.”

You don’t have to wait for so-called “Cyber Monday” to get good deals online, Schiavello said, as online sites that also have storefronts will usually offer the same prices and discounts as the stores.

Schiavello said the only reason she sees to go to a brick-and-mortar store is for “loss leader” items — those goods that stores sell at a loss to get shoppers in the door. Still, that can be a challenge, she said, as “you pretty much have to be first in line for those, and you have to know the layout of the store and the exact location of the item you are looking for in order to outrace other shoppers.”

WalletHub, a site that provides research and tools to help people manage their finances, said it’s important to maintain a budget or a payback plan before you set out on your shopping day. It can be easy to get swept up in the holiday atmosphere and overspend.

Considering the crowds and chaos that can ensue on Black Friday — reports of fights, trampled store employees and long wait times at stores across the country abound — shoppers might want to consider whether the time and energy used to shop on the day are worth it.

Concord resident Dean Miller thinks not. It’s not that shopping on Black Friday is inherently bad, Miller said, but in general, “it’s too crowded.” His preferred method of holiday shopping is to hit the Sunvalley Shopping Center in Concord each season, extending his shopping trip over the course of a few days.

But for those intent on wading into the sea of humanity, online giant Google may be able to help with its Popular Times graph that lets users know how typically crowded that Starbucks or Best Buy is at any given time of the day. This week it added real-time info just in time for Black Friday.

For shoppers like Tamura, Black Friday is more about the experience than the deals.

“The amount of laughter, the pictures, the memories — that’s what makes this more of a thing for me,” she said.

Her key piece of advice? “Enjoy the experience and don’t take it too seriously. You can always find something — there is something out there for everybody.”

Annie Sciacca is a reporter at Bay Area News Group, where she writes about business and economy topics that affect consumers throughout the region. She joined the company in 2016 after three years at the San Francisco Business Times, where she covered the food, retail, manufacturing and hotels industries throughout the Bay Area. She holds an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and a master's degree in political science from San Francisco State University.

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